U.S. Culture

THE U.S. CULTURE
American culture is rich, complex, and unique. It emerged from the short
and rapid European conquest of an enormous landmass sparsely settled by
diverse indigenous peoples. Although European cultural patterns
predominated, especially in language, the arts, and political
institutions, peoples from Africa, Asia, and North America also
contributed to American culture. All of these groups influenced popular
tastes in music, dress, entertainment, and cuisine. As a result, American
culture possesses an unusual mixture of patterns and forms forged from
among its diverse peoples. The many melodies of American culture have not
always been harmonious, but its complexity has created a society that
struggles to achieve tolerance and produces a uniquely casual personal
style that identifies Americans everywhere. The country is strongly
committed to democracy, in which views of the majority prevail, and
strives for equality in law and institutions.

Characteristics such as democracy and equality flourished in the American
environment long before taking firm root in European societies, where the
ideals originated. As early as the 1780s, Michel Guillaume Jean de
Crèvecoeur, a French writer living in Pennsylvania who wrote under the
pseudonym J. Hector St. John, was impressed by the democratic nature of
early American society. It was not until the 19th century that these
tendencies in America were most fully expressed. When French political
writer Alexis de Tocqueville, an acute social observer, traveled through
the United States in the 1830s, he provided an unusually penetrating
portrait of the nature of democracy in America and its cultural
consequences. He commented that in all areas of culture—family life, law,
arts, philosophy, and dress—Americans were inclined to emphasize the
ordinary and easily accessible, rather than the unique and complex. His
insight is as relevant today as it was when de Tocqueville visited the
United States. As a result, American culture is more often defined by its
popular and democratically inclusive features, such as blockbuster movies,
television comedies, sports stars, and fast food, than by its more
cultivated aspects as performed in theaters, published in books, or viewed
in museums and galleries. Even the fine arts in modern America often
partake of the energy and forms of popular culture, and modern arts are
often a product of the fusion of fine and popular arts.

While America is probably most well known for its popular arts, Americans
partake in an enormous range of cultural activities. Besides being avid
readers of a great variety of books and magazines catering to differing
tastes and interests, Americans also attend museums, operas, and ballets
in large numbers. They listen to country and classical music, jazz and
folk music, as well as classic rock-and-roll and new wave. Americans
attend and participate in basketball, football, baseball, and soccer
games. They enjoy food from a wide range of foreign cuisines, such as
Chinese, Thai, Greek, French, Indian, Mexican, Italian, Ethiopian, and
Cuban. They have also developed their own regional foods, such as
California cuisine and Southwestern, Creole, and Southern cooking. Still
evolving and drawing upon its ever more diverse population, American
culture has come to symbolize what is most up-to-date and modern. American
culture has also become increasingly international and is imported by
countries around the world.

FORCES THAT SHAPED AMERICAN CULTURE

Imported Traditions

Today American culture often sets the pace in modern style. For much of
its early history, however, the United States was considered culturally
provincial and its arts second-rate, especially in painting and
literature, where European artists defined quality and form. American
artists often took their cues from European literary salons and art
schools, and cultured Americans traveled to Europe to become educated. In
the late 18th century, some American artists produced high-quality art,
such as the paintings of John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Charles Stuart
and the silver work of Paul Revere. However, wealthy Americans who
collected art in the 19th century still bought works by European masters
and acquired European decorative arts—porcelain, silver, and antique
furniture—. They then ventured further afield seeking more exotic decor,
especially items from China and Japan. By acquiring foreign works, wealthy
Americans were able to obtain the status inherent in a long historical
tradition, which the United States lacked. Americans such as Isabella
Stewart Gardner and Henry Clay Frick amassed extensive personal
collections, which overwhelmingly emphasized non-American arts.

In literature, some 19th-century American writers believed that only the
refined manners and perceptions associated with the European upper classes
could produce truly great literary themes. These writers, notably Henry
James and Edith Wharton, often set their novels in the crosswinds of
European and American cultural contact. Britain especially served as the
touchstone for culture and quality because of its role in America's
history and the links of language and political institutions. Throughout
the 19th century, Americans read and imitated British poetry and novels,
such as those written by Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens.

The Emergence of an American Voice

American culture first developed a unique American voice during the 19th
century. This voice included a cultural identity that was strongly
connected to nature and to a divine mission. The new American voice had
liberating effects on how the culture was perceived, by Americans and by
others. Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau proposed that
the American character was deeply individualistic and connected to natural
and spiritual sources rather than to the conventions of social life. Many
of the 19th century’s most notable figures of American literature—Herman
Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain—also influenced this tradition.
The poetry of Walt Whitman, perhaps above all, spoke in a distinctly
American voice about people’s relation to one another, and described
American freedom, diversity, and equality with fervor.

Landscape painting in the United States during the 19th century vividly
captured the unique American cultural identity with its emphasis on the
natural environment. This was evident in the huge canvases set in the West
by Albert Bierstadt and the more intimate paintings of Thomas Cole. These
paintings, which were part of the Hudson River School, were often
enveloped in a radiant light suggesting a special connection to spiritual
sources. But very little of this American culture moved beyond the United
States to influence art trends elsewhere. American popular culture,
including craft traditions such as quilting or local folk music forged by
Appalachian farmers or former African slaves, remained largely local.

This sense of the special importance of nature for American identity led
Americans in the late 19th century to become increasingly concerned that
urban life and industrial products were overwhelming the natural
environment. Their concern led for calls to preserve areas that had not
been developed. Naturalists such as John Muir were pivotal in establishing
the first national parks and preserving scenic areas of the American West.
By the early 20th century, many Americans supported the drive to preserve
wilderness and the desire to make the great outdoors available to
everyone.

Immigration and Diversity

By the early 20th century, as the United States became an international
power, its cultural self-identity became more complex. The United States
was becoming more diverse as immigrants streamed into the country,
settling especially in America’s growing urban areas. At this time,
America's social diversity began to find significant expression in the
arts and culture. American writers of German, Irish, Jewish, and
Scandinavian ancestry began to find an audience, although some of the
cultural elite resisted the works, considering them crude and unrefined.

Many of these writers focused on 20th-century city life and themes, such
as poverty, efforts to assimilate into the United States, and family life
in the new country. These ethnically diverse writers included Theodore
Dreiser, of German ancestry; Henry Roth, a Jewish writer; and Eugene
O'Neill and James Farrell, of Irish background. European influence now
meant something very different than it once had: Artists changed the core
of American experience by incorporating their various immigrant origins
into its cultural vision. During the 1920s and 1930s, a host of African
American poets and novelists added their voices to this new American
vision. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, among
others, gathered in New York City’s Harlem district. They began to write
about their unique experiences, creating a movement called the Harlem
Renaissance.

Visual artists of the early 20th century also began incorporating the many
new sights and colors of the multiethnic America visible in these new city
settings. Painters associated with a group known as The Eight (also called
the Ashcan school), such as Robert Henri and John Sloan, portrayed the
picturesque sights of the city. Later painters and photographers focused
on the city’s squalid and seamier aspects. Although nature remained a
significant dimension of American cultural self-expression, as the
paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe demonstrated, it was no longer at the heart
of American culture. By the 1920s and 1930s few artists or writers
considered nature the singular basis of American cultural identity.

In popular music too, the songs of many nations became American songs. Tin
Pan Alley (Union Square in New York City, the center of music publishing
at the turn of the 20th century) was full of immigrant talents who helped
define American music, especially in the form of the Broadway musical.
Some songwriters, such as Irving Berlin and George M. Cohan, used their
music to help define American patriotic songs and holiday traditions.
During the 1920s musical forms such as the blues and jazz began to
dominate the rhythms of American popular music. These forms had their
roots in Africa as adapted in the American South and then in cities such
as New Orleans, Louisiana; Kansas City, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; and
Chicago, Illinois. Black artists and musicians such as Louis Armstrong,
Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie became the instruments of
a classic American sound. White composers such as George Gershwin and
performers such as Bix Beiderbecke also incorporated jazz rhythms into
their music, while instrumentalists such as Benny Goodman adopted jazz’s
improvisational style to forge a racially blended American form called
swing music.

Development of Mass Media

In the late 19th century, Americans who enjoyed the arts usually lived in
big cities or had the money to attend live performances. People who were
poor or distant from cultural centers settled for second-rate productions
mounted by local theater troupes or touring groups. New technologies, such
as the motion-picture camera and the phonograph, revolutionized the arts
by making them available to the masses. The movies, the phonograph, and,
somewhat later, the radio made entertainment available daily and allowed
Americans to experience elaborately produced dramas and all types of
music.

While mass media made entertainment available to more people, it also
began to homogenize tastes, styles, and points of view among different
groups in the United States. Class and ethnic distinctions in American
culture began to fade as mass media transmitted movies and music to people
throughout the United States. Some people criticized the growing
uniformity of mass culture for lowering the general standard of taste,
since mass media sought to please the largest number of people by
appealing to simpler rather than more complex tastes. However, culture
became more democratic as modern technology and mass media allowed it to
reach more people.

During the 20th century, mass entertainment extended the reach of American
culture, reversing the direction of influence as Europe and the world
became consumers of American popular culture. America became the dominant
cultural source for entertainment and popular fashion, from the jeans and
T-shirts young people wear to the music groups and rock stars they listen
to and the movies they see. People all over the world view American
television programs, often years after the program’s popularity has
declined in the United States. American television has become such an
international fixture that American news broadcasts help define what
people in other countries know about current events and politics. American
entertainment is probably one of the strongest means by which American
culture influences the world, although some countries, such as France,
resist this influence because they see it as a threat to their unique
national culture.

The Impact of Consumerism

Popular culture is linked to the growth of consumerism, the repeated
acquisition of an increasing variety of goods and services. The American
lifestyle is often associated with clothing, houses, electronic gadgets,
and other products, as well as with leisure time. As advertising
stimulates the desire for updated or improved products, people
increasingly equate their well-being with owning certain things and
acquiring the latest model. Television and other mass media broadcast a
portrayal of a privileged American lifestyle that many Americans hope to
imitate.

Americans often seek self-fulfillment and status through gaining material
items. Indeed, products consumed and owned, rather than professional
accomplishments or personal ideals, are often the standard of success in
American society. The media exemplify this success with the most glamorous
models of consumption: Hollywood actors, sports figures, or music
celebrities. This dependence on products and on constant consumption
defines modern consumer society everywhere. Americans have set the pace
for this consumer ideal, especially young people, who have helped fuel
this consumer culture in the United States and the world. Like the mass
media with which it is so closely linked, consumption has been extensively
criticized. Portrayed as a dizzy cycle of induced desire, consumerism
seems to erode older values of personal taste and economy. Despite this,
the mass production of goods has also allowed more people to live more
comfortably and made it possible for anyone to attain a sense of style,
blurring the most obvious forms of class distinction.

WAYS OF LIFE

Living Patterns

A fundamental element in the life of the American people was the enormous
expanse of land available. During the colonial period, the access to open
land helped scatter settlements. One effect was to make it difficult to
enforce traditional European social conventions, such as primogeniture, in
which the eldest son inherited the parents’ estate. Because the United
States had so much land, sons became less dependent on inheriting the
family estate. Religious institutions were also affected, as the widely
spread settlements created space for newer religious sects and revivalist
practices.

In the 19th century, Americans used their land to grow crops, which helped
create the dynamic agricultural economy that defined American society.
Many Americans were lured westward to obtain more land. Immigrants sought
land to settle, cattle ranchers wanted land for their herds, Southerners
looked to expand their slave economy into Western lands, and railroad
companies acquired huge tracts of land as they bound a loose society into
a coherent economic union. Although Native Americans had inhabited most of
the continent, Europeans and American settlers often viewed it as empty,
virgin land that they were destined to occupy. Even before the late 19th
century, when the last bloody battles between U.S. troops and Native
Americans completed the white conquest of the West, the idea of possessing
land was deeply etched into American cultural patterns and national
consciousness.

Throughout the 19th century, agricultural settlements existed on large,
separate plots of land, often occupying hundreds of acres. The Homestead
Act of 1862 promised up to 65 hectares (160 acres) of free land to anyone
with enough fortitude and vision to live on or cultivate the land. As a
result, many settlements in the West contained vast areas of sparsely
settled land, where neighbors lived great distances from one another. The
desire for residential privacy has remained a significant feature of
American culture.

This heritage continues to define patterns of life in the United States.
More than any other Western society, Americans are committed to living in
private dwellings set apart from neighbors. Despite the rapid urbanization
that began in the late 19th century, Americans insisted that each nuclear
family (parents and their children) be privately housed and that as many
families as possible own their own homes. This strong cultural standard
sometimes seemed unusual to new immigrants who were used to the more
crowded living conditions of Europe, but they quickly adopted this aspect
of American culture.

As cities became more densely populated, Americans moved to the suburbs.
Streetcars, first used during the 1830s, opened suburban rings around city
centers, where congestion was greatest. Banks offered long-term loans that
allowed individuals to invest in a home. Above all, the automobile in the
1920s was instrumental in furthering the move to the suburbs.

After World War II (1939-1945), developers carved out rural tracts to
build millions of single-family homes, and more Americans than ever before
moved to large suburban areas that were zoned to prevent commercial and
industrial activities. The federal government directly fueled this process
by providing loans to war veterans as part of the Servicemen’s
Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the GI Bill of Rights, which provided a
wide range of benefits to U.S. military personnel. In many of the new
housing developments, builders constructed homes according to a single
model, a process first established in Levittown, New York. These
identical, partially prefabricated units were rapidly assembled, making
suburban life and private land ownership available to millions of
returning soldiers in search of housing for their families.

American families still choose to live in either suburbs or the sprawling
suburban cities that have grown up in newer regions of the country. Vast
areas of the West, such as the Los Angeles metropolitan region in
California, the area around Phoenix, Arizona, and the Puget Sound area of
Washington state, became rapidly populated with new housing because of the
American desire to own a home on a private plot of land. In much of this
suburban sprawl, the central city has become largely indistinct. These
suburban areas almost invariably reflect Americans’ dependence on
automobiles and on government-supported highway systems.

As a result of Americans choosing to live in the suburbs, a distinctly
American phenomenon developed in the form of the shopping mall. The
shopping mall has increasingly replaced the old-fashioned urban downtown,
where local shops, restaurants, and cultural attractions were located.
Modern malls emphasize consumption as an exclusive activity. The shopping
mall, filled with department stores, specialty shops, fast-food
franchises, and movie multiplexes, has come to dominate retailing, making
suburban areas across America more and more alike. In malls, Americans
purchase food, clothing, and entertainment in an isolated environment
surrounded by parking lots.

The American preference for living in the suburbs has also affected other
living experiences. Because suburbs emphasize family life, suburban areas
also place a greater emphasis on school and other family-oriented
political issues than more demographically diverse cities. At their most
intense levels, desire for privacy and fear of crime have led to the
development of gated suburban communities that keep out those who are not
wanted.

Despite the growth of suburbs, American cities have maintained their
status as cultural centers for theaters, museums, concert halls, art
galleries, and more upscale restaurants, shops, and bookstores. In the
past several decades, city populations grew as young and trendy
professionals with few or no children sought out the cultural
possibilities and the diversity not available in the suburbs. Housing can
be expensive and difficult to find in older cities such as New York;
Boston, Massachusetts; and San Francisco, California. To cope, many city
dwellers restored older apartment buildings and houses. This process,
called gentrification, combines the American desire for the latest
technology with a newer appreciation for the classic and vintage.

Many poorer Americans cannot afford homes in the suburbs or apartments in
the gentrified areas of cities. They often rely upon federal housing
subsidies to pay for apartments in less-desirable areas of the city or in
public housing projects. Poorer people often live crowded together in
large apartment complexes in congested inner-city areas. Federal public
housing began when President Franklin Roosevelt sought to relieve the
worst conditions associated with poverty in the 1930s. It accelerated
during the 1950s and 1960s, as the government subsidized the renewal of
urban areas by replacing slums with either new or refurbished housing. In
the late 20th century, many people criticized public housing because it
was often the site for crime, drug deals, gangs, and other social ills.
Nevertheless, given the expensive nature of rental housing in cities,
public housing is often the only option available to those who cannot
afford to buy their own home. Private efforts, such as Habitat for
Humanity, have been organized to help the urban poor move from crowded,
high-rise apartments. These organizations help construct low-cost homes in
places such as the South Bronx in New York City, and they emphasize the
pride and autonomy of home ownership.

In recent years, the importance of home ownership has increased as higher
real estate prices have made the house a valuable investment. The newest
home construction has made standard the comforts of large kitchens,
luxurious bathrooms, and small gardens. In line with the rising cost of
land, these houses often stand on smaller lots than those constructed in
the period following World War II, when one-story ranch houses and large
lawns were the predominant style. At the same time, many suburban areas
have added other kinds of housing in response to the needs of single
people and people without children. As a result, apartments and
townhouses—available as rentals and as condominiums—have become familiar
parts of suburban life. For more information on urbanization and
suburbanization.

Food and Cuisine

The United States has rich and productive land that has provided Americans
with plentiful resources for a healthy diet. Despite this, Americans did
not begin to pay close attention to the variety and quality of the food
they ate until the 20th century, when they became concerned about eating
too much and becoming overweight. American food also grew more similar
around the country as American malls and fast-food outlets tended to
standardize eating patterns throughout the nation, especially among young
people. Nevertheless, American food has become more complex as it draws
from the diverse cuisines that immigrants have brought with them.

Historically, the rest of the world has envied the good, wholesome food
available in the United States. In the 18th and 19th centuries, fertile
soil and widespread land ownership made grains, meats, and vegetables
widely available, and famine that was common elsewhere was unknown in the
United States. Some immigrants, such as the Irish, moved to the United
States to escape famine, while others saw the bounty of food as one of the
advantages of immigration. By the late 19th century, America’s food
surplus was beginning to feed the world. After World War I (1914-1918) and
World War II, the United States distributed food in Europe to help
countries severely damaged by the wars. Throughout the 20th century,
American food exports have helped compensate for inadequate harvests in
other parts of the world. Although hunger does exist in the United States,
it results more from food being poorly distributed rather than from food
being unavailable.

Traditional American cuisine has included conventional European foodstuffs
such as wheat, dairy products, pork, beef, and poultry. It has also
incorporated products that were either known only in the New World or that
were grown there first and then introduced to Europe. Such foods include
potatoes, corn, codfish, molasses, pumpkin and other squashes, sweet
potatoes, and peanuts. American cuisine also varies by region. Southern
cooking was often different from cooking in New England and its upper
Midwest offshoots. Doughnuts, for example, were a New England staple,
while Southerners preferred corn bread. The availability of foods also
affected regional diets, such as the different kinds of fish eaten in New
England and the Gulf Coast. For instance, Boston clam chowder and
Louisiana gumbo are widely different versions of fish soup. Other
variations often depended on the contributions of indigenous peoples. In
the Southwest, for example, Mexican and Native Americans made hot peppers
a staple and helped define the spicy hot barbecues and chili dishes of the
area. In Louisiana, Cajun influence similarly created spicy dishes as a
local variation of Southern cuisine, and African slaves throughout the
South introduced foods such as okra and yams

By the late 19th century, immigrants from Europe and Asia were introducing
even more variations into the American diet. American cuisine began to
reflect these foreign cuisines, not only in their original forms but in
Americanized versions as well. Immigrants from Japan and Italy introduced
a range of fresh vegetables that added important nutrients as well as
variety to the protein-heavy American diet. Germans and Italians
contributed new skills and refinements to the production of alcoholic
beverages, especially beer and wine, which supplemented the more customary
hard cider and indigenous corn-mash whiskeys. Some imports became
distinctly American products, such as hot dogs, which are descended from
German wurst, or sausage. Spaghetti and pizza from Italy, especially, grew
increasingly more American and developed many regional spin-offs.
Americans even adapted chow mein from China into a simple American dish.
Not until the late 20th century did Americans rediscover these cuisines,
and many others, paying far more attention to their original forms and
cooking styles.

Until the early 20th century, the federal government did not regulate food
for consumers, and food was sometimes dangerous and impure. During the
Progressive period in the early 20th century, the federal government
intervened to protect consumers against the worst kinds of food
adulterations and diseases by passing legislation such as the Pure Food
and Drug Acts. As a result, American food became safer. By the early 20th
century, Americans began to consume convenient, packaged foods such as
breads and cookies, preserved fruits, and pickles. By the mid-20th
century, packaged products had expanded greatly to include canned soups,
noodles, processed breakfast cereals, preserved meats, frozen vegetables,
instant puddings, and gelatins. These prepackaged foods became staples
used in recipes contained in popular cookbooks, while peanut butter
sandwiches and packaged cupcakes became standard lunchbox fare. As a
result, the American diet became noteworthy for its blandness rather than
its flavors, and for its wholesomeness rather than its subtlety.

Americans were proud of their technology in food production and
processing. They used fertilizers, hybridization (genetically combining
two varieties), and other technologies to increase crop yields and
consumer selection, making foods cheaper if not always better tasting.
Additionally, by the 1950s, the refrigerator had replaced the old-
fashioned icebox and the cold cellar as a place to store food.
Refrigeration, because it allowed food to last longer, made the American
kitchen a convenient place to maintain readily available food stocks.
However, plentiful wholesome food, when combined with the sedentary 20th-
century lifestyle and work habits, brought its own unpleasant
consequences—overeating and excess weight. During the 1970s, 25 percent of
Americans were overweight; by the 1990s that had increased to 35 percent.

America’s foods began to affect the rest of the world—not only raw staples
such as wheat and corn, but a new American cuisine that spread throughout
the world. American emphasis on convenience and rapid consumption is best
represented in fast foods such as hamburgers, french fries, and soft
drinks, which almost all Americans have eaten. By the 1960s and 1970s fast
foods became one of America's strongest exports as franchises for
McDonald’s and Burger King spread through Europe and other parts of the
world, including the former Soviet Union and Communist China. Traditional
meals cooked at home and consumed at a leisurely pace—common in the rest
of the world, and once common in the United States—gave way to quick
lunches and dinners eaten on the run as other countries mimicked American
cultural patterns.

By the late 20th century, Americans had become more conscious of their
diets, eating more poultry, fish, and fresh fruits and vegetables and
fewer eggs and less beef. They also began appreciating fresh ingredients
and livelier flavors, and cooks began to rediscover many world cuisines in
forms closer to their original. In California, chefs combined the fresh
fruits and vegetables available year-round with ingredients and spices
sometimes borrowed from immigrant kitchens to create an innovative cooking
style that was lighter than traditional French, but more interesting and
varied than typical American cuisine. Along with the state’s wines,
California cuisine eventually took its place among the acknowledged forms
of fine dining.

As Americans became more concerned about their diets, they also became
more ecologically conscious. This consciousness often included an
antitechnology aspect that led some Americans to switch to a partially or
wholly vegetarian diet, or to emphasize products produced organically
(without chemical fertilizers and pesticides). Many considered these foods
more wholesome and socially responsible because their production was less
taxing to the environment. In the latter 20th century, Americans also
worried about the effects of newly introduced genetically altered foods
and irradiation processes for killing bacteria. They feared that these new
processes made their food less natural and therefore harmful.

These concerns and the emphasis on variety were by no means universal,
since food habits in the late 20th century often reflected society’s
ethnic and class differences. Not all Americans appreciated California
cuisine or vegetarian food, and many recent immigrants, like their
immigrant predecessors, often continued eating the foods they knew best.

At the end of the 20th century, American eating habits and food production
were increasingly taking place outside the home. Many people relied on
restaurants and on new types of fully prepared meals to help busy families
in which both adults worked full-time. Another sign of the public’s
changing food habits was the microwave oven, probably the most widely used
new kitchen appliance, since it can quickly cook foods and reheat prepared
foods and leftovers. Since Americans are generally cooking less of their
own food, they are more aware than at any time since the early 20th
century of the quality and health standards applied to food. Recent
attention to cases in which children have died from contaminated and
poorly prepared food has once again directed the public’s attention to the
government's role in monitoring food safety.

In some ways, American food developments are contradictory. Americans are
more aware of food quality despite, and maybe because of, their increasing
dependence on convenience. They eat a more varied diet, drawing on the
cuisines of immigrant groups (Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Indian, Cuban,
Mexican, and Ethiopian), but they also regularly eat fast foods found in
every shopping mall and along every highway. They are more suspicious of
technology, although they rely heavily on it for their daily meals. In
many ways, these contradictions reflect the many influences on American
life in the late 20th century—immigration, double-income households,
genetic technologies, domestic and foreign travel—and food has become an
even deeper expression of the complex culture of which it is part.

Dress

In many regions of the world, people wear traditional costumes at
festivals or holidays, and sometimes more regularly. Americans, however,
do not have distinctive folk attire with a long tradition. Except for the
varied and characteristic clothing of Native American peoples, dress in
the United States has rarely been specific to a certain region or based on
the careful preservation of decorative patterns and crafts. American dress
is derived from the fabrics and fashions of the Europeans who began
colonizing the country in the 17th century. Early settlers incorporated
some of the forms worn by indigenous peoples, such as moccasins and
garments made from animal skins (Benjamin Franklin is famous for flaunting
a raccoon cap when he traveled to Europe), but in general, fashion in the
United States adapted and modified European styles. Despite the number and
variety of immigrants in the United States, American clothing has tended
to be homogeneous, and attire from an immigrant’s homeland was often
rapidly exchanged for American apparel.

American dress is distinctive because of its casualness. American style in
the 20th century is recognizably more informal than in Europe, and for its
fashion sources it is more dependent on what people on the streets are
wearing. European fashions take their cues from the top of the fashion
hierarchy, dictated by the world-famous haute couture (high fashion)
houses of Paris, France, and recently those of Milan, Italy, and London,
England. Paris designers, both today and in the past, have also dressed
wealthy and fashionable Americans, who copied French styles. Although
European designs remain a significant influence on American tastes,
American fashions more often come from popular sources, such as the school
and the street, as well as television and movies. In the last quarter of
the 20th century, American designers often found inspiration in the
imaginative attire worn by young people in cities and ballparks, and that
worn by workers in factories and fields.

Blue jeans are probably the single most representative article of American
clothing. They were originally invented by tailor Jacob Davis, who
together with dry-goods salesman Levi Strauss patented the idea in 1873 as
durable clothing for miners. Blue jeans (also known as dungarees) spread
among workers of all kinds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
especially among cowboys, farmers, loggers, and railroad workers. During
the 1950s, actors Marlon Brando and James Dean made blue jeans fashionable
by wearing them in movies, and jeans became part of the image of teenage
rebelliousness. This fashion statement exploded in the 1960s and 1970s as
Levi's became a fundamental part of the youth culture focused on civil
rights and antiwar protests. By the late 1970s, almost everyone in the
United States wore blue jeans, and youths around the world sought them. As
designers began to create more sophisticated styles of blue jeans and to
adjust their fit, jeans began to express the American emphasis on
informality and the importance of subtlety of detail. By highlighting the
right label and achieving the right look, blue jeans, despite their worker
origins, ironically embodied the status consciousness of American fashion
and the eagerness to approximate the latest fad.

American informality in dress is such a strong part of American culture
that many workplaces have adopted the idea of “casual Friday,” a day when
workers are encouraged to dress down from their usual professional attire.
For many high-tech industries located along the West Coast, as well as
among faculty at colleges and universities, this emphasis on casual attire
is a daily occurrence, not just reserved for Fridays.

The fashion industry in the United States, along with its companion
cosmetics industry, grew enormously in the second half of the 20th century
and became a major source of competition for French fashion. Especially
notable during the late 20th century was the incorporation of sports logos
and styles, from athletic shoes to tennis shirts and baseball caps, into
standard American wardrobes. American informality is enshrined in the
wardrobes created by world-famous U.S. designers such as Calvin Klein, Liz
Claiborne, and Ralph Lauren. Lauren especially adopted the American look,
based in part on the tradition of the old West (cowboy hats, boots, and
jeans) and in part on the clean-cut sportiness of suburban style (blazers,
loafers, and khakis).

Sports and Recreation

Large numbers of Americans watch and participate in sports activities,
which are a deeply ingrained part of American life. Americans use sports
to express interest in health and fitness and to occupy their leisure
time. Sports also allow Americans to connect and identify with mass
culture. Americans pour billions of dollars into sports and their related
enterprises, affecting the economy, family habits, school life, and
clothing styles. Americans of all classes, races, sexes, and ages
participate in sports activities—from toddlers in infant swimming groups
and teenagers participating in school athletics to middle-aged adults
bowling or golfing and older persons practicing t’ai chi.

Public subsidies and private sponsorships support the immense network of
outdoor and indoor sports, recreation, and athletic competitions. Except
for those sponsored by public schools, most sports activities are
privately funded, and even American Olympic athletes receive no direct
national sponsorship. Little League baseball teams, for example, are
usually sponsored by local businesses. Many commercial football,
basketball, baseball, and hockey teams reflect large private investments.
Although sports teams are privately owned, they play in stadiums that are
usually financed by taxpayer-provided subsidies such as bond measures.
State taxes provide some money for state university sporting events.
Taxpayer dollars also support state parks, the National Park Service, and
the Forest Service, which provide places for Americans to enjoy camping,
fishing, hiking, and rafting. Public money also funds the Coast Guard,
whose crews protect those enjoying boating around the nation's shores.

Sports in North America go back to the Native Americans, who played forms
of lacrosse and field hockey. During colonial times, early Dutch settlers
bowled on New York City's Bowling Green, still a small park in southern
Manhattan. However, organized sports competitions and local participatory
sports on a substantial scale go back only to the late 19th century.
Schools and colleges began to encourage athletics as part of a balanced
program emphasizing physical as well as mental vigor, and churches began
to loosen strictures against leisure and physical pleasures. As work
became more mechanized, more clerical, and less physical during the late
19th century, Americans became concerned with diet and exercise. With
sedentary urban activities replacing rural life, Americans used sports and
outdoor relaxation to balance lives that had become hurried and confined.
Biking, tennis, and golf became popular for those who could afford them,
while sandlot baseball and an early version of basketball became popular
city activities. At the same time, organizations such as the Boy Scouts
and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) began to sponsor sports
as part of their efforts to counteract unruly behavior among young people.

Baseball teams developed in Eastern cities during the 1850s and spread to
the rest of the nation during the Civil War in the 1860s. Baseball quickly
became the national pastime and began to produce sports heroes such as Cy
Young, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth in the first half of the 20th century. With
its city-based loyalties and all-American aura, baseball appealed to many
immigrants, who as players and fans used the game as a way to fit into
American culture.

Starting in the latter part of the 19th century, football was played on
college campuses, and intercollegiate games quickly followed. By the early
20th century, football had become a feature of college life across the
nation. In the 1920s football pep rallies were commonly held on college
campuses, and football players were among the most admired campus leaders.
That enthusiasm has now spilled way beyond college to Americans throughout
the country. Spectators also watch the professional football teams of the
National Football League (NFL) with enthusiasm.

Basketball is another sport that is very popular as both a spectator and
participant sport. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)
hosts championships for men’s and women’s collegiate teams. Held annually
in March, the men’s NCAA national championship is one of the most popular
sporting events in the United States. The top men’s professional
basketball league in the United States is the National Basketball
Association; the top women’s is Women’s National Basketball Association.
In addition, many people play basketball in amateur leagues and
organizations. It is also common to see people playing basketball in parks
and local gymnasiums around the country.

Another major sport played in the United States is ice hockey. Ice hockey
began as an amateur sport played primarily in the Northeast. The first
U.S. professional ice hockey team was founded in Boston in 1924. Ice
hockey’s popularity has spread throughout the country since the 1960s. The
NCAA holds a national collegiate ice hockey championship in April of each
year. The country’s top professional league is the National Hockey League
(NHL). NHL teams play a regular schedule that culminates in the
championship series. The winner is awarded the Stanley Cup, the league’s
top prize.

Television transformed sports in the second half of the 20th century. As
more Americans watched sports on television, the sports industry grew into
an enormous business, and sports events became widely viewed among
Americans as cultural experiences. Many Americans shared televised moments
of exaltation and triumph throughout the year: baseball during the spring
and summer and its World Series in the early fall, football throughout the
fall crowned by the Super Bowl in January, and the National Basketball
Association (NBA) championships in the spring. The Olympic Games, watched
by millions of people worldwide, similarly rivet Americans to their
televisions as they watch outstanding athletes compete on behalf of their
nations. Commercial sports are part of practically every home in America
and have allowed sports heroes to gain prominence in the national
imagination and to become fixtures of the consumer culture. As well-known
faces and bodies, sports celebrities such as basketball player Michael
Jordan and baseball player Mark McGwire are hired to endorse products.

Although televised games remove the viewing public from direct contact
with events, they have neither diminished the fervor of team
identification nor dampened the enthusiasm for athletic participation.
Americans watch more sports on television than ever, and they personally
participate in more varied sporting activities and athletic clubs.
Millions of young girls and boys across the country play soccer, baseball,
tennis, and field hockey.

At the end of the 20th century, Americans were taking part in individual
sports of all kinds—jogging, bicycling, swimming, skiing, rock climbing,
playing tennis, as well as more unusual sports such as bungee jumping,
hang gliding, and wind surfing. As Americans enjoy more leisure time, and
as Hollywood and advertising emphasize trim, well-developed bodies, sports
have become a significant component of many people's lives. Many Americans
now invest significant amounts of money in sports equipment, clothing, and
gym memberships. As a result, more people are dressing in sporty styles of
clothing. Sports logos and athletic fashions have become common aspects of
people’s wardrobes, as people need to look as though they participate in
sports to be in style. Sports have even influenced the cars Americans
drive, as sport utility vehicles accommodate the rugged terrain, elaborate
equipment, and sporty lifestyles of their owners.

Probably the most significant long-term development in 20th-century sports
has been the increased participation of minorities and women. Throughout
the early 20th century, African Americans made outstanding contributions
to sports, despite being excluded from organized white teams. The
exclusion of black players from white baseball led to the creation of a
separate Negro National League in 1920. On the world stage, track-and-
field star Jessie Owens became a national hero when he won four gold
medals and set world and Olympic records at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
The racial segregation that prevented African Americans from playing
baseball in the National League until 1947 has been replaced by the
enormous successes of African Americans in all fields of sport.

Before the 20th century women could not play in most organized sports.
Soon, however, they began to enter the sports arena. Helen Wills Moody, a
tennis champion during the 1920s, and Babe Didrikson Zaharias, one of the
20th century’s greatest women athletes, were examples of physical grace
and agility. In 1972 Title IX of the Education Amendments Act outlawed
discrimination based on gender in education, including school sports.
Schools then spent additional funding on women's athletics, which provided
an enormous boost to women’s sports of all kinds, especially basketball,
which became very popular. Women's college basketball, part of the
National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), is a popular focus of
interest. By the end of the 20th century, this enthusiasm led to the
creation of a major professional women’s basketball league. Women have
become a large part of athletics, making their mark in a wide range of
sports.

Sports have become one of the most visible expressions of the vast
extension of democracy in 20th-century America. They have become more
inclusive, with many Americans both personally participating and enjoying
sports as spectators. Once readily available only to the well-to-do,
sports and recreation attract many people, aided by the mass media, the
schools and colleges, the federal and state highway and park systems, and
increased leisure time.

Celebrations and Holidays

Americans celebrate an enormous variety of festivals and holidays because
they come from around the globe and practice many religions. They also
celebrate holidays specific to the United States that commemorate
historical events or encourage a common national memory. Holidays in
America are often family or community events. Many Americans travel long
distances for family gatherings or take vacations during holidays. In
fact, by the end of the 20th century, many national holidays in the United
States had become three-day weekends, which many people used as mini
vacations. Except for the Fourth of July and Veterans Day, most
commemorative federal holidays, including Memorial Day, Labor Day,
Columbus Day, and Presidents’ Day, are celebrated on Mondays so that
Americans can enjoy a long weekend. Because many Americans tend to create
vacations out of these holiday weekends rather than celebrate a particular
event, some people believe the original significance of many of these
occasions has been eroded.

Because the United States is a secular society founded on the separation
of church and state, many of the most meaningful religiously based
festivals and rituals, such as Easter, Rosh Hashanah, and Ramadan, are not
enshrined as national events, with one major exception. Christmas, and the
holiday season surrounding it, is an enormous commercial enterprise, a
fixture of the American social calendar, and deeply embedded in the
popular imagination. Not until the 19th century did Christmas in the
United States begin to take on aspects of the modern holiday celebration,
such as exchanging gifts, cooking and eating traditional foods, and
putting up often-elaborate Christmas decorations. The holiday has grown in
popularity and significance ever since. Santa Claus; brightly decorated
Christmas trees; and plenty of wreathes, holly, and ribbons help define
the season for most children. Indeed, because some religious faiths do not
celebrate Christmas, the Christmas season has expanded in recent years to
become the “holiday season,” embracing Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of
Lights, and Kwanzaa, a celebration of African heritage. Thus, the
Christmas season has become the closest thing to a true national festival
in the United States.

The expansion of Christmas has even begun to encroach on the most
indigenous of American festivals, Thanksgiving. Celebrated on the last
Thursday in November, Thanksgiving has largely shed its original religious
meaning (as a feast of giving thanks to God) to become a celebration of
the bounty of food and the warmth of family life in America. American
children usually commemorate the holiday’s origins at school, where they
re-create the original event: Pilgrims sharing a harvest feast with Native
Americans. Both the historical and the religious origins of the event have
largely given way to a secular celebration centered on the traditional
Thanksgiving meal: turkey—an indigenous American bird—accompanied by foods
common in early New England settlements, such as pumpkins, squashes, and
cranberries. Since many Americans enjoy a four-day holiday at
Thanksgiving, the occasion encourages family reunions and travel. Some
Americans also contribute time and food to the needy and the homeless
during the Thanksgiving holiday.

Another holiday that has lost its older, religious meaning in the United
States is Halloween, the eve of All Saints’ Day. Halloween has become a
celebration of witches, ghosts, goblins, and candy that is especially
attractive to children. On this day and night, October 31, many homes are
decorated and lit by jack-o'-lanterns, pumpkins that have been hollowed
out and carved. Children dress up and go trick-or-treating, during which
they receive treats from neighbors. An array of orange-colored candies has
evolved from this event, and most trick-or-treat bags usually brim with
chocolate bars and other confections.

The Fourth of July, or Independence Day, is the premier American national
celebration because it commemorates the day the United States proclaimed
its freedom from Britain with the Declaration of Independence. Very early
in its development, the holiday was an occasion for fanfare, parades, and
speeches celebrating American freedom and the uniqueness of American life.
Since at least the 19th century, Americans have commemorated their
independence with fireworks and patriotic music. Because the holiday marks
the founding of the republic in 1776, flying the flag of the United States
(sometimes with the original 13 stars) is common, as are festive
barbecues, picnics, fireworks, and summer outings.

Most other national holidays have become less significant over time and
receded in importance as ways in which Americans define themselves and
their history. For example, Columbus Day was formerly celebrated on
October 12, the day explorer Christopher Columbus first landed in the West
Indies, but it is now celebrated on the second Monday of October to allow
for a three-day weekend. The holiday originally served as a traditional
reminder of the "discovery" of America in 1492, but as Americans became
more sensitive to their multicultural population, celebrating the conquest
of Native Americans became more controversial.

Holidays honoring wars have also lost much of their original significance.
Memorial Day, first called Decoration Day and celebrated on May 30, was
established to honor those who died during the American Civil War (1861-
1865), then subsequently those who died in all American wars. Similarly,
Veterans Day was first named Armistice Day and marked the end of World War
I (1914-1918). During the 1950s the name of the holiday was changed in the
United States, and its significance expanded to honor armed forces
personnel who served in any American war.

The memory of America's first president, George Washington, was once
celebrated on his birthday, February 22nd. The date was changed to the
third Monday in February to create a three-day weekend, as well as to
incorporate the birthday of another president, Abraham Lincoln, who was
born on February 12th. The holiday is now popularly called Presidents’ Day
and is less likely to be remembered as honoring the first and 16th
American presidents than as a school and work holiday. Americans also
memorialize Martin Luther King, Jr., the great African American civil
rights leader who was assassinated in 1968. King’s birthday is celebrated
as a national holiday in mid-January. The celebration of King's birthday
has become a sign of greater inclusiveness in 20th-century American
society.

EDUCATION

Role of Education

The United States has one of the most extensive and diverse educational
systems in the world. Educational institutions exist at all learning
levels, from nursery schools for the very young to higher education for
older youths and adults of all ages. Education in the United States is
notable for the many goals it aspires to accomplish—promoting democracy,
assimilation, nationalism, equality of opportunity, and personal
development. Because Americans have historically insisted that their
schools work toward these sometimes conflicting goals, education has often
been the focus of social conflict.

While schools are expected to achieve many social objectives, education in
America is neither centrally administered nor supported directly by the
federal government, unlike education in other industrialized countries. In
the United States, each state is responsible for providing schooling,
which is funded through local taxes and governed by local school boards.
In addition to these government-funded public schools, the United States
has many schools that are privately financed and maintained. More than 10
percent of all elementary and secondary students in the United States
attend private schools. Religious groups, especially the Roman Catholic
Church, run many of these. Many of America's most renowned universities
and colleges are also privately endowed and run. As a result, although
American education is expected to provide equality of opportunity, it is
not easily directed toward these goals. This complex enterprise, once one
of the proudest achievements of American democracy because of its
diversity and inclusiveness, became the subject of intense debate and
criticism during the second half of the 20th century. People debated the
goals of schools as well as whether schools were educating students well
enough.

History of Education in America

Until the 1830s, most American children attended school irregularly, and
most schools were either run privately or by charities. This irregular
system was replaced in the Northeast and Midwest by publicly financed
elementary schools, known as common schools. Common schools provided
rudimentary instruction in literacy and trained students in citizenship.
This democratic ideal expanded after the Civil War to all parts of the
nation. By the 1880s and 1890s, schools began to expand attendance
requirements so that more children and older children attended school
regularly. These more rigorous requirements were intended to ensure that
all students, including those whose families had immigrated from
elsewhere, were integrated into society. In addition, the schools tried to
equip children with the more complex skills required in an industrialized
urban society.

Education became increasingly important during the 20th century, as
America’s sophisticated industrial society demanded a more literate and
skilled workforce. In addition, school degrees provided a sought-after
means to obtain better-paying and higher-status jobs. Schools were the one
American institution that could provide the literate skills and work
habits necessary for Americans of all backgrounds to compete in
industries. As a result, education expanded rapidly. In the first decades
of the 20th century, mandatory education laws required children to
complete grade school. By the end of the 20th century, many states
required children to attend school until they were at least 16. In 1960,
45 percent of high school graduates enrolled in college; by 1996 that
enrollment rate had risen to 65 percent. By the late 20th century, an
advanced education was necessary for success in the globally competitive
and technologically advanced modern economy. According to the U.S. Census
Bureau, workers with a bachelor’s degree in 1997 earned an average of
$40,000 annually, while those with a high school degree earned about
$23,000. Those who did not complete high school earned about $16,000.

In the United States, higher education is widely available and obtainable
through thousands of private, religious, and state-run institutions, which
offer advanced professional, scientific, and other training programs that
enable students to become proficient in diverse subjects. Colleges vary in
cost and level of prestige. Many of the oldest and most famous colleges on
the East Coast are expensive and set extremely high admissions standards.
Large state universities are less difficult to enter, and their fees are
substantially lower. Other types of institutions include state
universities that provide engineering, teaching, and agriculture degrees;
private universities and small privately endowed colleges; religious
colleges and universities; and community and junior colleges that offer
part-time and two-year degree programs. This complex and diverse range of
schools has made American higher education the envy of other countries and
one of the nation’s greatest assets in creating and maintaining a
technologically advanced society.

When more people began to attend college, there were a number of
repercussions. Going to college delayed maturity and independence for many
Americans, extending many of the stresses of adolescence into a person’s
20s and postponing the rites of adulthood, such as marriage and
childbearing. As society paid more attention to education, it also devoted
a greater proportion of its resources to it. Local communities were
required to spend more money on schools and teachers, while colleges and
universities were driven to expand their facilities and course offerings
to accommodate an ever-growing student body. Parents were also expected to
support their children longer and to forgo their children's contribution
to the household.

Funding

Education is an enormous investment that requires contributions from many
sources. American higher education is especially expensive, with its heavy
investment in laboratory space and research equipment. It receives funding
from private individuals, foundations, and corporations. Many private
universities have large endowments, or funds, that sustain the
institutions beyond what students pay in tuition and fees. Many, such as
Harvard University in Massachusetts and Stanford University in California,
raise large sums of money through fund drives. Even many state-funded
universities seek funds from private sources to augment their budgets.
Most major state universities, such as those in Michigan and California,
now rely on a mixture of state and private resources.

Before World War II, the federal government generally played a minor role
in financing education, with the exception of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and
1890. These acts granted the states public lands that could be sold for
the purpose of establishing and maintaining institutions of higher
education. Many so-called land-grant state universities were founded
during the 19th century as a result of this funding. Today, land-grant
colleges include some of the nation’s premier state universities. The
government also provided some funding for basic research at universities.

The American experience in World War II (especially the success of the
Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb) made clear that
scientific and technical advances, as well as human resources, were
essential to national security. As a result, the federal government became
increasingly involved in education at all levels and substantially
expanded funding for universities. The federal government began to provide
substantial amounts of money for university research programs through
agencies such as the National Science Foundation, and later through the
National Institutes of Health and the departments of Energy and Defense.
At the same time, the government began to focus on providing equal
educational opportunities for all Americans. Beginning with the GI Bill,
which financed educational programs for veterans, and later in the form of
fellowships and direct student loans in the 1960s, more and more Americans
were able to attend colleges and universities.

During the 1960s the federal government also began to play more of a role
in education at lower levels. The Great Society programs of President
Lyndon Johnson developed many new educational initiatives to assist poor
children and to compensate for disadvantage. Federal money was funneled
through educational institutions to establish programs such as Head Start,
which provides early childhood education to disadvantaged children. Some
Americans, however, resisted the federal government’s increased presence
in education, which they believed contradicted the long tradition of state-
sponsored public schooling.

By the 1980s many public schools were receiving federal subsidies for
textbooks, transportation, breakfast and lunch programs, and services for
students with disabilities. This funding enriched schools across the
country, especially inner-city schools, and affected the lives of millions
of schoolchildren. Although federal funding increased, as did federal
supervision, to guarantee an equitable distribution of funds, the
government did not exercise direct control over the academic programs
schools offered or over decisions about academic issues. During the 1990s,
the administration of President Bill Clinton urged the federal government
to move further in exercising leadership by establishing academic
standards for public schools across the country and to evaluate schools
through testing.

Concerns in Elementary Education

The United States has historically contended with the challenges that come
with being a nation of immigrants. Schools are often responsible for
modifying educational offerings to accommodate immigrants. Early schools
reflected many differences among students and their families but were also
a mechanism by which to overcome these differences and to forge a sense of
American commonality. Common schools, or publicly financed elementary
schools, were first introduced in the mid-19th century in the hopes of
creating a common bond among a diverse citizenship. By the early 20th
century, massive immigration from Europe caused schools to restructure and
expand their programs to more effectively incorporate immigrant children
into society. High schools began to include technical, business, and
vocational curricula to accommodate the various goals of its more diverse
population. The United States continues to be concerned about how to
incorporate immigrant groups.

The language in which students are taught is one of the most significant
issues for schools. Many Americans have become concerned about how best to
educate students who are new to the English language and to American
culture. As children of all ages and from dozens of language backgrounds
seek an education, most schools have adopted some variety of bilingual
instruction. Students are taught in their native language until their
knowledge of English improves, which is often accomplished through an
English as a Second Language (ESL) program. Some people have criticized
these bilingual programs for not encouraging students to learn English
more quickly, or at all. Some Americans fear that English will no longer
provide a uniform basis for American identity; others worry that immigrant
children will have a hard time finding employment if they do not become
fluent in English. In response to these criticisms, voters in California,
the state that has seen the largest influx of recent immigrants, passed a
law in 1998 requiring that all children attending public schools be taught
in English and prohibiting more than one year of bilingual instruction.

Many Americans, including parents and business leaders, are also alarmed
by what they see as inadequate levels of student achievement in subjects
such as reading, mathematics, and science. On many standardized tests,
American students lag behind their counterparts in Europe and Asia. In
response, some Americans have urged the adoption of national standards by
which individual schools can be evaluated. Some have supported more
rigorous teacher competency standards. Another response that became
popular in the 1990s is the creation of charter schools. These schools are
directly authorized by the state and receive public funding, but they
operate largely outside the control of local school districts. Parents and
teachers enforce self-defined standards for these charter schools.

Schools are also working to incorporate computers into classrooms. The
need for computer literacy in the 21st century has put an additional
strain on school budgets and local resources. Schools have struggled to
catch up by providing computer equipment and instruction and by making
Internet connections available. Some companies, including Apple Computer,
Inc., have provided computer equipment to help schools meet their
students’ computer-education needs.

Concerns in Higher Education

Throughout the 20th century, Americans have attended schools to obtain the
economic and social rewards that come with highly technical or skilled
work and advanced degrees. However, as the United States became more
diverse, people debated how to include different groups, such as women and
minorities, into higher education. Blacks have historically been excluded
from many white institutions, or were made to feel unwelcome. Since the
19th century, a number of black colleges have existed to compensate for
this broad social bias, including federally chartered and funded Howard
University. In the early 20th century, when Jews and other Eastern
Europeans began to apply to universities, some of the most prestigious
colleges imposed quotas limiting their numbers.

Americans tried various means to eliminate the most egregious forms of
discrimination. In the early part of the century, "objective" admissions
tests were introduced to counteract the bias in admissions. Some educators
now view admissions tests such as the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT),
originally created to simplify admissions testing for prestigious private
schools, as disadvantageous to women and minorities. Critics of the SAT
believed the test did not adequately account for differences in social and
economic background. Whenever something as subjective as ability or merit
is evaluated, and when the rewards are potentially great, people hotly
debate the best means to fairly evaluate these criteria.

Until the middle of the 20th century, most educational issues in the
United States were handled locally. After World War II, however, the
federal government began to assume a new obligation to assure equality in
educational opportunity, and this issue began to affect college admissions
standards. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the government
increased its role in questions relating to how all Americans could best
secure equal access to education.

Schools had problems providing equal opportunities for all because
quality, costs, and admissions criteria varied greatly. To deal with these
problems, the federal government introduced the policy of affirmative
action in education in the early 1970s. Affirmative action required that
colleges and universities take race, ethnicity, and gender into account in
admissions to provide extra consideration to those who have historically
faced discrimination. It was intended to assure that Americans of all
backgrounds have an opportunity to train for professions in fields such as
medicine, law, education, and business administration.

Affirmative action became a general social commitment during the last
quarter of the 20th century. In education, it meant that universities and
colleges gave extra advantages and opportunities to blacks, Native
Americans, women, and other groups that were generally underrepresented at
the highest levels of business and in other professions. Affirmative
action also included financial assistance to members of minorities who
could not otherwise afford to attend colleges and universities.
Affirmative action has allowed many minority members to achieve new
prominence and success.

At the end of the 20th century, the policy of affirmative action was
criticized as unfair to those who were denied admission in order to admit
those in designated group categories. Some considered affirmative action
policies a form of reverse discrimination, some believed that special
policies were no longer necessary, and others believed that only some
groups should qualify (such as African Americans because of the nation’s
long history of slavery and segregation). The issue became a matter of
serious discussion and is one of the most highly charged topics in
education today. In the 1990s three states—Texas, California, and
Washington—eliminated affirmative action in their state university
admissions policies.

Several other issues have become troubling to higher education. Because
tuition costs have risen to very high levels, many smaller private
colleges and universities are struggling to attract students. Many
students and their parents choose state universities where costs are much
lower. The decline in federal research funds has also caused financial
difficulties to many universities. Many well-educated students, including
those with doctoral degrees, have found it difficult to find and keep
permanent academic jobs, as schools seek to lower costs by hiring part-
time and temporary faculty. As a result, despite its great strengths and
its history of great variety, the expense of American higher education may
mean serious changes in the future.

Education is fundamental to American culture in more ways than providing
literacy and job skills. Educational institutions are the setting where
scholars interpret and pass on the meaning of the American experience.
They analyze what America is as a society by interpreting the nation’s
past and defining objectives for the future. That information eventually
forms the basis for what children learn from teachers, textbooks, and
curricula. Thus, the work of educational institutions is far more
important than even job training, although this is usually foremost in
people’s minds.

ARTS AND LETTERS

The arts, more than other features of culture, provide avenues for the
expression of imagination and personal vision. They offer a range of
emotional and intellectual pleasures to consumers of art and are an
important way in which a culture represents itself. There has long been a
Western tradition distinguishing those arts that appeal to the multitude,
such as popular music, from those—such as classical orchestral
music—normally available to the elite of learning and taste. Popular art
forms are usually seen as more representative American products. In the
United States in the recent past, there has been a blending of popular and
elite art forms, as all the arts experienced a period of remarkable cross-
fertilization. Because popular art forms are so widely distributed, arts
of all kinds have prospered.

The arts in the United States express the many faces and the enormous
creative range of the American people. Especially since World War II,
American innovations and the immense energy displayed in literature,
dance, and music have made American cultural works world famous. Arts in
the United States have become internationally prominent in ways that are
unparalleled in history. American art forms during the second half of the
20th century often defined the styles and qualities that the rest of the
world emulated. At the end of the 20th century, American art was
considered equal in quality and vitality to art produced in the rest of
the world.

Throughout the 20th century, American arts have grown to incorporate new
visions and voices. Much of this new artistic energy came in the wake of
America’s emergence as a superpower after World War II. But it was also
due to the growth of New York City as an important center for publishing
and the arts, and the immigration of artists and intellectuals fleeing
fascism in Europe before and during the war. An outpouring of talent also
followed the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s, as cultural
discrimination against blacks, women, and other groups diminished.

American arts flourish in many places and receive support from private
foundations, large corporations, local governments, federal agencies,
museums, galleries, and individuals. What is considered worthy of support
often depends on definitions of quality and of what constitutes art. This
is a tricky subject when the popular arts are increasingly incorporated
into the domain of the fine arts and new forms such as performance art and
conceptual art appear. As a result, defining what is art affects what
students are taught about past traditions (for example, Native American
tent paintings, oral traditions, and slave narratives) and what is
produced in the future. While some practitioners, such as studio artists,
are more vulnerable to these definitions because they depend on financial
support to exercise their talents, others, such as poets and
photographers, are less immediately constrained.

Artists operate in a world where those who theorize and critique their
work have taken on an increasingly important role. Audiences are
influenced by a variety of intermediaries—critics, the schools,
foundations that offer grants, the National Endowment for the Arts,
gallery owners, publishers, and theater producers. In some areas, such as
the performing arts, popular audiences may ultimately define success. In
other arts, such as painting and sculpture, success is far more dependent
on critics and a few, often wealthy, art collectors. Writers depend on
publishers and on the public for their success.

Unlike their predecessors, who relied on formal criteria and appealed to
aesthetic judgments, critics at the end of the 20th century leaned more
toward popular tastes, taking into account groups previously ignored and
valuing the merger of popular and elite forms. These critics often relied
less on aesthetic judgments than on social measures and were eager to
place artistic productions in the context of the time and social
conditions in which they were created. Whereas earlier critics attempted
to create an American tradition of high art, later critics used art as a
means to give power and approval to nonelite groups who were previously
not considered worthy of including in the nation’s artistic heritage.

Not so long ago, culture and the arts were assumed to be an unalterable
inheritance—the accumulated wisdom and highest forms of achievement that
were established in the past. In the 20th century generally, and certainly
since World War II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions
in sculpture, painting, dance, music, and literature. The arts have
changed rapidly, with one movement replacing another in quick succession.

Visual Arts

The visual arts have traditionally included forms of expression that
appeal to the eyes through painted surfaces, and to the sense of space
through carved or molded materials. In the 19th century, photographs were
added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that make up the visual
arts. The visual arts were further augmented in the 20th century by the
addition of other materials, such as found objects. These changes were
accompanied by a profound alteration in tastes, as earlier emphasis on
realistic representation of people, objects, and landscapes made way for a
greater range of imaginative forms.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American art was considered
inferior to European art. Despite noted American painters such as Thomas
Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American visual arts
barely had an international presence.

American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the 1930s as
New Deal government programs provided support to artists along with other
sectors of the population. Artists connected with each other and developed
a sense of common purpose through programs of the Public Works
Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as well as programs
sponsored by the Treasury Department. Most of the art of the period,
including painting, photography, and mural work, focused on the plight of
the American people during the depression, and most artists painted real
people in difficult circumstances. Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and
Ben Shahn expressed the suffering of ordinary people through their
representations of struggling farmers and workers. While artists such as
Benton and Grant Wood focused on rural life, many painters of the 1930s
and 1940s depicted the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob
Lawrence, for example, re-created the history and lives of African
Americans. Other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, tried to
use human figures to describe emotional states such as loneliness and
despair.

Abstract Expressionism

Shortly after World War II, American art began to garner worldwide
attention and admiration. This change was due to the innovative fervor of
abstract expressionism in the 1950s and to subsequent modern art movements
and artists. The abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century broke
from the realist and figurative tradition set in the 1930s. They
emphasized their connection to international artistic visions rather than
the particularities of people and place, and most abstract expressionists
did not paint human figures (although artist Willem de Kooning did
portrayals of women). Color, shape, and movement dominated the canvases of
abstract expressionists. Some artists broke with the Western art tradition
by adopting innovative painting styles—during the 1950s Jackson Pollock
"painted" by dripping paint on canvases without the use of brushes, while
the paintings of Mark Rothko often consisted of large patches of color
that seem to vibrate.

Abstract expressionists felt alienated from their surrounding culture and
used art to challenge society’s conventions. The work of each artist was
quite individual and distinctive, but all the artists identified with the
radicalism of artistic creativity. The artists were eager to challenge
conventions and limits on expression in order to redefine the nature of
art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the confining
artistic traditions of the past.

The most notable activity took place in New York City, which became one of
the world’s most important art centers during the second half of the 20th
century. The radical fervor and inventiveness of the abstract
expressionists, their frequent association with each other in New York
City’s Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and
dealers turned them into an artistic movement. Also known as the New York
School, the participants included Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz
Kline, and Arshile Gorky, in addition to Rothko and Pollock.

The members of the New York School came from diverse backgrounds such as
the American Midwest and Northwest, Armenia, and Russia, bringing an
international flavor to the group and its artistic visions. They hoped to
appeal to art audiences everywhere, regardless of culture, and they felt
connected to the radical innovations introduced earlier in the 20th
century by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Some
of the artists—Hans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooning—were not born
in the United States, but all the artists saw themselves as part of an
international creative movement and an aesthetic rebellion.

As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past
and free to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract
expressionists gave way to other innovative styles in American art.
Beginning in the 1930s Joseph Cornell created hundreds of boxed
assemblages, usually from found objects, with each based on a single theme
to create a mood of contemplation and sometimes of reverence. Cornell's
boxes exemplify the modern fascination with individual vision, art that
breaks down boundaries between forms such as painting and sculpture, and
the use of everyday objects toward a new end. Other artists, such as
Robert Rauschenberg, combined disparate objects to create large, collage-
like sculptures known as combines in the 1950s. Jasper Johns, a painter,
sculptor, and printmaker, recreated countless familiar objects, most
memorably the American flag.

The most prominent American artistic style to follow abstract
expressionism was the pop art movement that began in the 1950s. Pop art
attempted to connect traditional art and popular culture by using images
from mass culture. To shake viewers out of their preconceived notions
about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used everyday objects such as pillows
and beds to create witty, soft sculptures. Roy Lichtenstein took this a
step further by elevating the techniques of commercial art, notably
cartooning, into fine art worthy of galleries and museums. Lichtenstein's
large, blown-up cartoons fill the surface of his canvases with grainy
black dots and question the existence of a distinct realm of high art.
These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a
refreshing new way, thereby breaking down the conventions that formerly
defined what was worthy of artistic representation.

Probably the best-known pop artist, and a leader in the movement, was Andy
Warhol, whose images of a Campbell’s soup can and of the actress Marilyn
Monroe explicitly eroded the boundaries between the art world and mass
culture. Warhol also cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in
film as a director and producer to break down the boundaries between
traditional and popular art. Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose
conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhol's
pictures, and his own face, were instantly recognizable.

Conceptual art, as it came to be known in the 1960s, like its
predecessors, sought to break free of traditional artistic associations.
In conceptual art, as practiced by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept
takes precedent over actual object, by stimulating thought rather than
following an art tradition based on conventional standards of beauty and
artisanship.

Modern artists changed the meaning of traditional visual arts and brought
a new imaginative dimension to ordinary experience. Art was no longer
viewed as separate and distinct, housed in museums as part of a historical
inheritance, but as a continuous creative process. This emphasis on
constant change, as well as on the ordinary and mundane, reflected a
distinctly American democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way
removed the emphasis from technique and polished performance, and many
modern artworks and experiences became more about expressing ideas than
about perfecting finished products.

Photography

Photography is probably the most democratic modern art form because it can
be, and is, practiced by most Americans. Since 1888, when George Eastman
developed the Kodak camera that allowed anyone to take pictures,
photography has struggled to be recognized as a fine art form. In the
early part of the 20th century, photographer, editor, and artistic
impresario Alfred Stieglitz established 291, a gallery in New York City,
with fellow photographer Edward Steichen, to showcase the works of
photographers and painters. They also published a magazine called Camera
Work to increase awareness about photographic art. In the United States,
photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial
photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of
photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs,
had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of
photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to
this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man.

Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their
living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the
most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs
of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social
awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He
helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in
1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at
the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco
Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite
National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on
photographic technique.

Adams's elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a
growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the
20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a
documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places,
and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including
child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often
implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers
joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal
government to create a photographic record of rural America. Walker Evans,
Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and
widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during
the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period.

In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born
photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of
documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America
introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that
existed in the midst of prosperity and world power.

Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This
search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus.
Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans
altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized
artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made
them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that
photographs are meant to capture.

American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art
photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely
available in galleries, books, and magazines.

A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected
to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but
are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and
quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative
arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an
appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also
developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of
opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans
to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is
more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists.

Literature

American literature since World War II is much more diverse in its voices
than ever before. It has also expanded its view of the past as people
rediscovered important sources from non-European traditions, such as
Native American folktales and slave narratives. Rediscovering these
traditions expanded the range of American literary history.

American Jewish writing from the 1940s to the 1960s was the first serious
outpouring of an American literature that contained many voices. Some
Jewish writers had begun to be heard as literary critics and novelists
before World War II, part of a general broadening of American literature
during the first half of the 20th century. After the war, talented Jewish
writers appeared in such numbers and became so influential that they stood
out as a special phenomenon. They represented at once a subgroup within
literature and the new voice of American literature.

Several Jewish American novelists, including Herman Wouk and Norman
Mailer, wrote important books about the war without any special ethnic
resonance. But writers such as novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and
Philip Roth, and storytellers Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick wrote most
memorably from within the Jewish tradition. Using their Jewish identity
and history as background, these authors asked how moral behavior was
possible in modern America and how the individual could survive in the
contemporary world. Saul Bellow most conspicuously posed these questions,
framing them even before the war was over in his earliest novel, Dangling
Man (1944). He continued to ask them in various ways through a series of
novels paralleling the life cycle, including The Adventures of Augie March
(1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). One novel in the
series earned a Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt's Gift, 1975). Bellow was awarded
the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. Like Bellow, Philip Roth and
Bernard Malamud struggled with identity and selfhood as well as with
morality and fate. However, Roth often resisted being categorized as a
Jewish writer. Playwright Arthur Miller rarely invoked his Jewish
heritage, but his plays contained similar existential themes.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was also part of this postwar group of American
Jewish writers. His novels conjure up his lost roots and life in prewar
Poland and the ghostly, religiously inspired fantasies of Jewish existence
in Eastern Europe before World War II. Written in Yiddish and much less
overtly American, Singer’s writings were always about his own specific
past and that of his people. Singer's re-creation of an earlier world as
well as his stories of adjusting to the United States won him a Nobel
Prize in literature in 1978.

Since at least the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, American
writers of African descent, such as Richard Wright, sought to express the
separate experiences of their people while demanding to be recognized as
fully American. The difficulty of that pursuit was most completely and
brilliantly realized in the haunting novel Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph
Ellison. African American writers since then have contended with the same
challenge of giving voice to their experiences as a marginalized and often
despised part of America.

Several African American novelists in recent decades have struggled to
represent the wounded manner in which African Americans have participated
in American life. In the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin discovered how
much he was part of the United States after a period of self-imposed exile
in Paris, and he wrote about his dark and hurt world in vigorous and
accusatory prose. The subject has also been at the heart of an
extraordinary rediscovery of the African American past in the plays of
Lorraine Hansberry and the fiction of Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, and
Toni Morrison. Probably more than any American writer before her, Morrison
has grappled with the legacy that slavery inflicted upon African Americans
and with what it means to live with a separate consciousness within
American culture. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American
writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in literature.

Writers from other groups, including Mexican Americans, Native Americans,
Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and Filipino Americans, also grappled
with their separate experiences within American culture. Among them, N.
Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich have dealt with
issues of poverty, life on reservations, and mixed ancestry among Native
Americans. Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros have dealt with the
experiences of Mexican Americans, and Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston
have explored Chinese American family life.

Even before World War II, writers from the American South reflected on
what it meant to have a separate identity within American culture. The
legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction left the South with a
sense of a lost civilization, embodied in popular literature such as Gone
With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, and with questions about how a
Southern experience could frame a literary legacy. Southern literature in
the 20th century draws deeply on distinct speech rhythms, undercurrents of
sin, and painful reflections on evil as part of a distinctly Southern
tradition. William Faulkner most fully expressed these issues in a series
of brilliant and difficult novels set in a fictional Mississippi county.
These novels, most of them published in the 1930s, include The Sound and
the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom (1936). For
his contribution, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949.
More recent Southern writers, such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor,
Walker Percy, James Dickey, and playwright Tennessee Williams, have
continued this tradition of Southern literature.

In addition to expressing the minority consciousness of Southern
regionalism, Faulkner's novels also reflected the artistic modernism of
20th-century literature, in which reality gave way to frequent
interruptions of fantasy and the writing is characterized by streams of
consciousness rather than by precise sequences in time. Other American
writers, such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and E. L. Doctorow
also experimented with different novel forms and tried to make their
writing styles reflect the peculiarities of consciousness in the chaos of
the modern world. Doctorow, for example, in his novel Ragtime juxtaposed
real historical events and people with those he made up. Pynchon
questioned the very existence of reality in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).

Aside from Faulkner, perhaps the greatest modernist novelist writing in
the United States was émigré Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov first wrote in his
native Russian, and then in French, before settling in the United States
and writing in English. Nabokov saw no limits to the possibilities of
artistic imagination, and he believed the artist's ability to manipulate
language could be expressed through any subject. In a series of novels
written in the United States, Nabokov demonstrated that he could develop
any situation, even the most alien and forbidden, to that end. This was
demonstrated in Lolita (1955), a novel about sexual obsession that caused
a sensation and was first banned as obscene.

Despite its obvious achievements, modernism in the United States had its
most profound effect on other forms of literature, especially in poetry
and in a new kind of personal journalism that gradually erased the sharp
distinctions between news reporting, personal reminiscence, and fiction
writing.

20th-Century Poetry

Modern themes and styles of poetry have been part of the American
repertoire since the early part of the 20th century, especially in the
work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Their works were difficult,
emotionally restrained, full of non-American allusions, and often
inaccessible. After World War II, new poetic voices developed that were
more exuberant and much more American in inspiration and language. The
poets who wrote after the war often drew upon the work of William Carlos
Williams and returned to the legacy of Walt Whitman, which was democratic
in identification and free-form in style. These poets provided postwar
poetry with a uniquely American voice.

The Beatnik, or Beat, poets of the 1950s notoriously followed in Whitman’s
tradition. They adopted a radical ethic that included drugs, sex, art, and
the freedom of the road. Jack Kerouac captured this vision in On the Road
(1957), a quintessential book about Kerouac’s adventures wandering across
the United States. The most significant poet in the group was Allen
Ginsberg, whose sexually explicit poem Howl (1956) became the subject of a
court battle after it was initially banned as obscene. The Beat poets
spanned the country, but adopted San Francisco as their special outpost.
The city continued to serve as an important arena for poetry and
unconventional ideas, especially at the City Lights Bookstore co-owned by
writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other modernist poets included
Gwendolyn Brooks, who retreated from the conventional forms of her early
poetry to write about anger and protest among African Americans, and
Adrienne Rich, who wrote poetry focused on women's rights, needs, and
desires.

Because it is open to expressive forms and innovative speech, modern
poetry is able to convey the deep personal anguish experienced by several
of the most prominent poets of the postwar period, among them Robert
Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.
Sometimes called confessional poets, they used poetry to express
nightmarish images of self-destruction. As in painting, removing limits
and conventions on form permitted an almost infinite capacity for
conveying mood, feeling, pain, and inspiration. This personal poetry also
brought American poetry closer to the European modernist tradition of
emotional anguish and madness. Robert Frost, probably the most famous and
beloved of modern American poets, wrote evocative and deeply felt poetry
that conveyed some of these same qualities within a conventional pattern
of meter and rhyme.

Another tradition of modern poetry moved toward playful engagement with
language and the creative process. This tradition was most completely
embodied in the brilliant poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose work dealt with
the role of creative imagination. This tradition was later developed in
the seemingly simple and prosaic poetry of John Ashbery, who created
unconventional works that were sometimes records of their own creation.
Thus, poetry after World War II, like the visual arts, expanded the
possibilities of emotional expression and reflected an emphasis on the
creative process. The idea of exploration and pleasure through unexpected
associations and new ways of viewing reality connected poetry to the
modernism of the visual arts.

Journalism

Modernist sensibilities were also evident in the emergence of a new form
of journalism. Journalism traditionally tried to be factual and objective
in presentation. By the mid-1970s, however, some of America's most
creative writers were using contemporary events to create a new form of
personal reporting. This new approach stretched the boundaries of
journalism and brought it closer to fiction because the writers were
deeply engaged and sometimes personally involved in events. Writers such
as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion created a literary
journalism that infused real events with their own passion. In Armies of
the Night (1968), the record of his involvement in the peace movement,
Mailer helped to define this new kind of writing. Capote's In Cold Blood
(1966), the retelling of the senseless killing of a Kansas family, and
Mailer’s story of a murderer's fate in The Executioner's Song (1979)
brought this hyperrealism to chilling consummation. No less vivid were
Didion's series of essays on California culture in the late 1960s and her
reporting of the sensational trial of football star O. J. Simpson in 1995.

Performing Arts

As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in
the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms.
The classical performing arts—music, opera, dance, and theater—were not a
widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th
century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by
Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated.
Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet and opera,
orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions between
traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas.

During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to incorporate
wider groups of people. The African American community produced great
musicians who became widely known around the country. Jazz and blues
singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie
Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and
1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller
adapted jazz to make a unique American music that was popular around the
country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American
influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin
American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba,
were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and
jazz elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by
the Brazilian bossa nova.

Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United
States attracted international talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer
George Balanchine established the short-lived American Ballet Company in
the 1930s; later he founded the company that in the 1940s would become the
New York City Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during
the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well. By the 1970s this
company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an
internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the company’s artistic
director during the 1980s.

In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who
composed symphonies using innovative musical styles, moved to the United
States in 1939. German-born pianist, composer, and conductor André Previn,
who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a
number of distinguished American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet,
cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony
Orchestra in Washington, D.C., in 1977.

Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century
successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Composers
George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable
examples. Gershwin combined jazz and spiritual music with classical in
popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess
(1935). Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and
American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan redefined dance along
more expressive and free-form lines.

Some artists in music and dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and
choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the
1930s Cage worked with electronically produced sounds and sounds made with
everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of
piano. During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began
to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects.

Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation
was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. Beginning in
the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic
performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical
revues but without being as complex as European grand opera. By the 1960s,
this American musical tradition was well established and had produced
extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George
and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz
Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an
immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the
musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that
produced some of America's greatest choreographers, among them Jerome
Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse.

In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that
it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard
Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated
version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York that became an instant classic
in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born
conductor to lead a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic.
He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador
of the American style of conducting. He brought the art of classical music
to the public, especially through his "Young People's Concerts,"
television shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many
facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world
and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation.

In many ways, Bernstein embodied a transformation of American music that
began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s
resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their
increased availability to larger audiences. New York City, the American
center for art performances, experienced an artistic explosion in the
1960s and 1970s. Experimental off-Broadway theaters opened, new ballet
companies were established that often emphasized modern forms or blended
modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially important
influence), and an experimental music scene developed that included
composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri
String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to expand with the
works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet.

As the variety of performances expanded, so did the serious crossover
between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and
1970s, an expanded repertoire of traditional arts was being conveyed to
new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard in formal settings
such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been restricted to classical music,
while the Brooklyn Academy of Music became a venue for experimental music,
exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional productions of
grand opera. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging Shakespeare
in Central Park since the 1950s. Boston conductor Arthur Fiedler was
playing a mixed repertoire of classical and popular favorites to large
audiences, often outdoors, with the Boston Pops Orchestra. By the mid-
1970s the United States had several world-class symphony orchestras,
including those in Chicago; New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. Once a specialized taste that
often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increased
in popularity as the roster of respected institutions grew to include
companies in Seattle, Washington; Houston, Texas; and Santa Fe, New
Mexico. American composers such as John Adams and Philip Glass began
composing modern operas in a new minimalist style during the 1970s and
1980s.

The crossover in tastes also influenced the Broadway musical, probably
America's most durable music form. Starting in the 1960s, rock music
became an ingredient in musical productions such as Hair (1967). By the
1990s, it had become an even stronger presence in musicals such as Bring
in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk (1996), which used African American music
and dance traditions, and Rent (1996) a modern, rock version of the
classic opera La Bohème. This updating of the musical opened the theater
to new ethnic audiences who had not previously attended Broadway shows, as
well as to young audiences who had been raised on rock music.

Performances of all kinds have become more available across the country.
This is due to both the sheer increase in the number of performance groups
as well as to advances in transportation. In the last quarter of the 20th
century, the number of major American symphonies doubled, the number of
resident theaters increased fourfold, and the number of dance companies
increased tenfold. At the same time, planes made it easier for artists to
travel. Artists and companies regularly tour, and they expand the
audiences for individual artists such as performance artist Laurie
Anderson and opera singer Jessye Norman, for musical groups such as the
Juilliard Quartet, and for dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American
Dance Theater. Full-scale theater productions and musicals first presented
on Broadway now reach cities across the country. The United States, once a
provincial outpost with a limited European tradition in performance, has
become a flourishing center for the performing arts.

Libraries and Museums

Libraries, museums, and other collections of historical artifacts have
been a primary means of organizing and preserving America’s legacy. In the
20th century, these institutions became an important vehicle for educating
the public about the past and for providing knowledge about the society of
which all Americans are a part.

Libraries

Private book collections go back to the early European settlement of the
New World, beginning with the founding of the Harvard University library
in 1638. Colleges and universities acquire books because they are a
necessary component of higher education. University libraries have many of
the most significant and extensive book collections. In addition to
Harvard’s library, the libraries at Yale University, Columbia University,
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, and the
University of California in Berkeley and Los Angeles are among the most
prominent, both in scope and in number of holdings. Many of these
libraries also contain important collections of journals, newspapers,
pamphlets, and government documents, as well as private papers, letters,
pictures, and photographs. These libraries are essential for preserving
America’s history and for maintaining the records of individuals,
families, institutions, and other groups.

Books in early America were scarce and expensive. Although some Americans
owned books, Benjamin Franklin made a much wider range of books and other
printed materials available to many more people when he created the first
generally recognized public library in 1731. Although Franklin’s Library
Company of Philadelphia loaned books only to paying subscribers, the
library became the first one in the nation to make books available to
people who did not own them. During the colonial period Franklin’s idea
was adopted by cities such as Boston, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode
Island; and Charleston, South Carolina.

These libraries set the precedent for the free public libraries that began
to spread through the United States in the 1830s. Public libraries were
seen as a way to encourage literacy among the citizens of the young
republic as well as a means to provide education in conjunction with the
public schools that were being set up at the same time. In 1848 Boston
founded the first major public library in the nation. By the late 19th
century, libraries were considered so essential to the nation's well-being
that industrialist Andrew Carnegie donated part of his enormous fortune to
the construction of library buildings. Because Carnegie believed that
libraries were a public obligation, he expected the books to be
contributed through public expenditure. Since the 19th century, locally
funded public libraries have become part of the American landscape, often
occupying some of the most imposing public buildings in cities such as New
York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia. The belief that the
knowledge and enjoyment that books provide should be accessible to all
Americans also resulted in bookmobiles that serve in inner cities and in
rural counties.

In addition to the numerous public libraries and university collections,
the United States boasts two major libraries with worldwide stature: the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the New York Public Library.
In 1800 Congress passed legislation founding the Library of Congress,
which was initially established to serve the needs of the members of
Congress. Since then, this extraordinary collection has become one of the
world's great libraries and a depository for every work copyrighted in the
United States. Housed in three monumental buildings named after Presidents
John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, the library is open to
the public and maintains major collections of papers, photographs, films,
maps, and music in addition to more than 17 million books.

The New York Public Library was founded in 1895. The spectacular and
enormous building that today houses the library in the heart of the city
opened in 1911 with more than a million volumes. The library is guarded by
a famous set of lion statues, features a world-famous reading room, and
contains more than 40 million catalogued items. Although partly funded
through public dollars, the library also actively seeks funds from private
sources for its operations.

Institutions such as these libraries are fundamental to the work of
scholars, who rely on the great breadth of library collections. Scholars
also rely on many specialized library collections throughout the country.
These collections vary greatly in the nature of their holdings and their
affiliations. The Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor at the San
Francisco Public Library contains more than 20,000 volumes in 35
languages. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem,
part of the New York Public Library, specializes in the history of
Africans around the world. The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women
in America, located at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in
Massachusetts, houses the papers of prominent American women such as Susan
B. Anthony and Amelia Earhart. The Bancroft Collection of Western
Americana and Latin Americana is connected with the University of
California at Berkeley. The Huntington Library in San Marino, California,
was established by American railroad executive Henry Huntington and
contains a collection of rare and ancient books and manuscripts. The
Newberry Library in Chicago, one of the most prestigious research
libraries in the nation, contains numerous collections of rare books,
maps, and manuscripts.

Scholars of American history and culture also use the vast repository of
the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., and
its local branches. As the repository and publisher of federal documents,
the National Archives contain an extraordinary array of printed material,
ranging from presidential papers and historical maps to original
government documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It houses hundreds of millions of
books, journals, photos, and other government papers that document the
life of the American people and its government. The library system is
deeply entrenched in the cultural life of the American people, who have
from their earliest days insisted on the importance of literacy and
education, not just for the elite but for all Americans.

Museums

The variety of print resources available in libraries is enormously
augmented by the collections housed in museums. Although people often
think of museums as places to view art, in fact museums house a great
variety of collections, from rocks to baseball memorabilia. In the 20th
century, the number of museums exploded. And by the late 20th century, as
institutions became increasingly aware of their important role as
interpreters of culture, they attempted to bring their collections to the
general public. Major universities have historically also gathered various
kinds of collections in museums, sometimes as a result of gifts. The Yale
University Art Gallery, for example, contains an important collection of
American arts, including paintings, silver, and furniture, while the
Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California at
Berkeley specializes in archaeological objects and Native American
artifacts.

The earliest museums in the United States grew out of private collections,
and throughout the 19th century they reflected the tastes and interests of
a small group. Often these groups included individuals who cultivated a
taste for the arts and for natural history, so that art museums and
natural history museums often grew up side by side. American artist
Charles Willson Peale established the first museum of this kind in
Philadelphia in the late 18th century.

The largest and most varied collection in the United States is contained
in the separate branches of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C. The Smithsonian, founded in 1846 as a research institution, developed
its first museums in the 1880s. It now encompasses 16 museums devoted to
various aspects of American history, as well as to artifacts of everyday
life and technology, aeronautics and space, gems and geology, and natural
history.

The serious public display of art began when the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York City, founded in 1870, moved to its present location in
Central Park in 1880. At its installation, the keynote speaker announced
that the museum’s goal was education, connecting the museum to other
institutions with a public mission. The civic leaders, industrialists, and
artists who supported the Metropolitan Museum, and their counterparts who
established the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago,
and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, were also collectors of fine art.
Their collections featured mainly works by European masters, but also
Asian and American art. They often bequeathed their collections to these
museums, thus shaping the museum’s policies and holdings. Their taste in
art helped define and develop the great collections of art in major
metropolitan centers such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.
In several museums, such as the Metropolitan and the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C., collectors created institutions whose holdings
challenged the cultural treasures of the great museums of Europe.

Funding

Museums continued to be largely elite institutions through the first half
of the 20th century, supported by wealthy patrons eager to preserve
collections and to assert their own definitions of culture and taste.
Audiences for most art museums remained an educated minority of the
population through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century.
By the second decade of the 20th century, the tastes of this elite became
more varied. In many cases, women within the families of the original art
patrons (such as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller,
and Peggy Guggenheim) encouraged the more avant-garde artists of the
modern period. Women founded new institutions to showcase modern art, such
as the Museum of Modern Art (established by three women in 1929) and the
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Although these museums still
catered to small, educated, cosmopolitan groups, they expanded the
definition of refined taste to include more nontraditional art. They also
encouraged others to become patrons for new artists, such as the abstract
expressionists in the mid-20th century, and helped establish the United
States as a significant place for art and innovation after World War II.

Although individual patronage remained the most significant source of
funding for the arts throughout the 20th century, private foundations
began to support various arts institutions by the middle of the century.
Among these, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Rockefeller
Foundation were especially important in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Ford
Foundation in the 1960s. The federal government also became an active
sponsor of the arts during the 20th century. Its involvement had important
consequences for expanding museums and for creating a larger audience.

The federal government first began supporting the arts during the Great
Depression of the 1930s through New Deal agencies, which provided monetary
assistance to artists, musicians, photographers, actors, and directors.
The Work Projects Administration also helped museums to survive the
depression by providing jobs to restorers, cataloguers, clerical workers,
carpenters, and guards. At the same time, innovative arrangements between
wealthy individuals and the government created a new kind of joint
patronage for museums. In the most notable of these, American financier,
industrialist, and statesman Andrew W. Mellon donated his extensive art
collection and a gallery to the federal government in 1937 to serve as the
nucleus for the National Gallery of Art. The federal government provides
funds for the maintenance and operation of the National Gallery, while
private donations from foundations and corporations pay for additions to
the collection as well as for educational and research programs.

Government assistance during the Great Depression set a precedent for the
federal government to start funding the arts during the 1960s, when
Congress appropriated money for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
as part of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities. The NEA
provides grants to individuals and nonprofit organizations for the
cultivation of the arts, although grants to institutions require private
matching funds. The need for matching funds increased private and state
support of all kinds, including large donations from newer arts patrons
such as the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Pew Charitable
Trusts. Large corporations such as the DuPont Company, International
Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and the Exxon Corporation also
donated to the arts.

Expansion

The increased importance placed on art throughout the 20th century helped
fuel a major expansion in museums. By the late 1960s and 1970s, art
museums were becoming aware of their potential for popular education and
pleasure. Audiences for museums increased as museums received more funding
and became more willing to appeal to the public with blockbuster shows
that traveled across the country. One such show, The Treasures of
Tutankhamun, which featured ancient Egyptian artifacts, toured the country
from 1976 to 1979. Art museums increasingly sought attractions that would
appeal to a wider audience, while at the same time expanding the
definition of art. This effort resulted in museums exhibiting even
motorcycles as art, as did the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1998.

Museums also began to expand the kinds of art and cultural traditions they
exhibited. By the 1990s, more and more museums displayed natural and
cultural artifacts and historical objects from non-European societies.
These included objects ranging from jade carvings, baskets, and ceramics
to calligraphy, masks, and furniture. Egyptian artifacts had been
conspicuous in the holdings of New York's Metropolitan Museum and the
Brooklyn Museum since the early 20th century. The opening in 1989 of two
Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of African
Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, indicated an awareness
of a much broader definition of the American cultural heritage. The Asian
Art Museum of San Francisco and the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian in
Washington, D.C., maintain collections of Asian art and cultural objects.
The 1987 opening of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a new Smithsonian
museum dedicated to Asian and Near Eastern arts, confirmed the importance
of this tradition.

Collectors and museums did not neglect the long-venerated Western
tradition, as was clear from the personal collection of ancient Roman and
Greek art owned by American oil executive and financier J. Paul Getty.
Opened to the public in 1953, the museum named after him was located in
Malibu, California, but grew so large that in 1997 the J. Paul Getty
Museum expanded into a new Getty Center, a complex of six buildings in Los
Angeles. By the end of the 20th century, Western art was but one among an
array of brilliant cultural legacies that together celebrate the human
experience and the creativity of the American past.

Memorials and Monuments

The need to memorialize the past has a long tradition and is often
associated with wars, heroes, and battles. In the United States, monuments
exist throughout the country, from the Revolutionary site of Bunker Hill
to the many Civil War battlefields. The nation’s capital features a large
number of monuments to generals, war heroes, and leaders. Probably the
greatest of all these is Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where
there are thousands of graves of veterans of American wars, including the
Tomb of the Unknowns and the gravesite of President John F. Kennedy. In
addition to these traditional monuments to history, millions of people are
drawn to the polished black wall that is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The memorial is a stark
reminder of the losses suffered in a war in which more than 58,000
Americans died and of a time of turmoil in the nation.

No less important than monuments to war heroes are memorials to other
victims of war. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened
in 1993 in Washington, D.C., is dedicated to documenting the extermination
of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II. It
contains photographs, films, oral histories, and artifacts as well as a
research institute, and has become an enormous tourist attraction. It is
one example of a new public consciousness about museums as important
sources of information and places in which to come to terms with important
and painful historical events. Less elaborate Holocaust memorials have
been established in cities across the country, including New York, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Monuments to national heroes are an important part of American culture.
These range from the memorials to Presidents George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.,
to the larger-than-life faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and
Theodore Roosevelt carved into Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Some
national memorials also include monuments to ordinary citizens, such as
the laborers, farmers, women, and African Americans who are part of the
new Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Americans also commemorate popular culture with museums and monuments such
as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, and the
Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. These
collections of popular culture are as much a part of American heritage as
are fine arts museums and statues of national heroes. As a result of this
wide variety of institutions and monuments, more people know about the
breadth of America’s past and its many cultural influences. This new
awareness has even influenced the presentation of artifacts in natural
history museums. Where these once emphasized the differences among human
beings and their customs by presenting them as discrete and unrelated
cultures, today’s museums and monuments emphasize the flow of culture
among people.

The expansion in types of museums and the increased attention to audience
is due in part to new groups participating in the arts and in discussions
about culture. In the early 20th century, many museums were supported by
wealthy elites. Today’s museums seek to attract a wider range of people
including students from inner cities, families from the suburbs, and
Americans of all backgrounds. The diverse American population is eager to
have its many pasts and talents enshrined. The funding now available
through foundations and federal and state governments provides assistance.
This development has not been without resistance. In the 1980s and 1990s
people challenged the role of the federal government in sponsoring certain
controversial art and culture forms, posing threats to the existence of
the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Nevertheless, even these controversies have made clearer how
much art and cultural institutions express who we are as a people.
Americans possess many different views and pasts, and they constantly
change what they create, how they communicate, and what they appreciate
about their past.